City Under the Stars
Page 11
Finally, Overton made another of his sharp, dismissive gestures, and the guards dragged Hanson back to his cell, where he huddled on his cot, moaning, oozing blood, shivering with pain and fever.
In the morning, he felt fine. His burns had healed, his skin had reknitted itself, his bruises had vanished, and his foot was once again uncrushed and whole.
The guards looked in on him and then went hurriedly away, and in a few moments, Overton was there, peering puzzledly at him, and then prodding Hanson’s unmarked shoulder where his skin had been burnt and blackened with hot irons the day before. He gestured impatiently, and the guards dragged Hanson away to the basement room, where they did it all again.
This went on for days, the guards torturing Hanson while he begged them to just tell him what they wanted him to say and he’d say it, Hanson’s wounds miraculously healing at night, leaving him hale enough to be tormented again the next day.
One day in the windowless room, Overton, who until now had been silent during their sessions, greeted Hanson with an apologetic smile and said, “I’m sorry about this, Hanson, I really am. It’s nothing personal. It’s just my job.” Two guards seized Hanson and wrestled him down into a chair, while another stretched Hanson’s arm out across a thick wooden butcher’s block that hadn’t been there before that day. They strapped Hanson’s arm in place, and one of the guards picked up an ax.
“For the love of God,” Hanson said, his voice cracking shrilly in terror in the middle of the words, “don’t do this!”
Overton shrugged philosophically. “Consider it a scientific experiment,” he said, and then gestured to the guard, who stepped forward, hefted the ax, swung it aloft, and then cut Hanson’s hand off with one crashing blow.
Hanson screamed. It actually didn’t hurt as much initially as some of the other things that had been done to him in that room, but he could see blood fountaining from the stump of his wrist, and his throat squeezed shut with fear. Light rapidly drained from the world, the periphery of his vision going first, everything narrowing down to a cone. The room filled up with darkness.
The last thing he saw was Overton leaning forward to peer at him, and then laughing whimsically and saying, “Let’s see him grow that back!”
He did. It took almost two days for Hanson’s hand to grow back, another day for him to recover full use of his fingers.
Overton came to Hanson’s cell, stared at the regrown hand, and left without a word, looking frightened. The guards also gave him fearful looks out of the corners of their eyes, showing the whites, and backed out of the cell, closing the door behind him.
* * *
There were no more torture sessions after that. Two or three times a week, Hanson—who had by this point been allowed a change of clothes—would be “invited” to Overton’s office, where Overton would be sitting at his desk, head bowed over some papers. “Sit down,” he would always say. “I’ll be right with you.” As if they two had a professional relationship, as if Hanson were his client and had an appointment to be here, as if he were simply providing a service that Hanson required—as if the days Hanson had spent in the torture chamber had never happened at all. He would be placed in a straight-backed wooden chair in front of Overton’s desk, sometimes given a cup of chicory or even a mug of applejack, and encouraged to “have a nice talk” with Overton, who wrote everything Hanson said down in a notebook in a surprisingly neat and even delicate hand. Hanson cooperated with this process as best he could, anxious to keep Overton in what Hanson thought of as “Good Overton” mode; he was already all too familiar with “Bad Overton.” After a while, though, having gone over his experiences in the City of God—it seemed they believed now, belatedly, that he’d really been inside the Wall—in exhausting detail more than once, he ran short of things to say, and Overton filled the gap by rambling on about himself, becoming expansive and discursive, and not a little self-aggrandizing, boasting about his position and his prowess, telling Hanson all about the problems and tribulations of running a prison full of recalcitrant hard-core prisoners who didn’t understand all the lengths he went to in order to help them. Hanson found this more than a little creepy, but it was better than being burned with red-hot irons, even if his flesh was going to heal the next day, so he did his best to play up and look interested and attentive.
The last time Overton had Hanson brought to his office, though, before Hanson had even had a chance to sit down, Overton had frowned and said, “I have asked for advice on your case. The responsibility has been passed on. There’s nothing more I can do.” He then gestured dismissively, impatiently, as if Hanson was wasting his valuable time by importuning him with unreasonable requests about inconsequential matters. The guards hustled Hanson away, back to his cell.
After that, he was left alone. They never came for him anymore, no one asked him any more questions. In fact, he barely saw another living soul from one week to the next, except when the guards came into his cell to empty his slop jar, keeping a wary, almost frightened eye on him while they did so, and refusing to speak.
He was left alone in his cell, only occasionally hearing another human voice far off somewhere in the corridors outside. He learned to relish and even long for the off-key whistling of the guard as he went by on the other side of the door, a sound other than his own breathing, and eventually learned which tunes the guard most liked to whistle. Once he started whistling the same jig that the guard was whistling as he passed, and the guard’s whistling cut off with a frightened abruptness and didn’t start up again for several days.
He lost track of time. Had months gone by, or years? Winter came, and left, and came again.
* * *
Hanson looked out his window. It was the only thing left to him, his lifeline to the world beyond his cell, and he drank in the bright, moving, multicolored normality that came in through it like a man desperately breathing through a hole in the ice.
He came to know every branch visible in every tree, the shape and size and colors of their leaves and berries, where every bird had its nest. He learned to identify the different kinds of birds by their calls, and even, through patient listening, came to gain some idea of what information those calls contained, whether it was “This is my tree!” or “I want a mate!” or “Look out for the fox!” There were marmoset-like little creatures living in the rocks at the near end of the field, and he watched avidly as they went about their daily dramas, squabbling over territory and mates, whistling shrill alarm calls and hiding from predators—or presumed predators, since Hanson never saw any—in amongst the rocks; one whole summer they tried doggedly to teach themselves how to light a fire, making piles of branches and dry tinder, breaking Hanson’s heart by failing again and again and again. Occasionally, a bee or a fumblefoot would buzz by the window, sometimes even coming in through the bars to zip around inside the cell before finding their way back out again. One glorious day, a hawk struck a pigeon just outside the window, and carried it to a nearby stump to eat, tearing at the pigeon’s breast and releasing a swirling cloud of torn white feathers as it fed that rose and danced on the wind, Hanson luxuriating in the motion—motion! A flurry of blessed activity and change in a static world! Something different!—like a man dying of thirst who’s been offered cool water. Very occasionally, the highlight of the week, the memory of which he would cherish and turn over in his mind again and again until it was polished smooth, riders on horseback or a wagon would pass in the curve of the road visible at the far end of the meadow. Once, in the dog days of summer, heat hanging in the air as thick as honey, he saw a naked little boy driving a herd of bedraggled, ulcerated, two-headed goats before him. In the spring and fall, deer would sometimes come out of the deep woods near the marmoset rocks, some of them bearing glossy radiation scars from where they’d come in contact with one of the old “hot spots,” and blink at him with their sad, liquid eyes. If he spoke to them, trying to coax them closer, or perhaps just to hear his own voice, they would vanish like ghosts.
* * *
As he stared from his window, the world gradually changed, and not just with the changing of the seasons.
On a cold, cloudless night, clinging to the window bars, it was sometimes possible to watch the Bear or the Scorpion or other constellations rising over the edge of the Earth. He was watching, one night, when there arose an actinic purple glow on the northern horizon that sponged away the stars. From then on, the fizzing purple glow was always there, dimly visible even in the daylight if you shaded your eyes to look.
A few days later, a ragged wave of refugees came south down the road, grim, silent men and women carrying bindles and dragging sledges piled with household goods, herding both straggling children and straggling pigs and sheep along before them. For most of a day they streamed past, looking down or inward, not speaking, and then they were gone, around the bend in the road and out of sight.
Sometime later, there was a brief firefight down there at the bend of the road, small groups of men in unfamiliar uniforms blazing away at each other, some with guns, some with weird-looking implements that emitted flashes of light. Hanson clutched the bars of his window tight, reveling in the sudden flurry of action and drama, not stopping to worry that a stray bullet might hit him. Would it even kill him if it did? After a while, the firefight moved off into the woods, leaving bodies sprawled lifelessly across the road until someone from the prison with a mule and wagon came out and hauled them away. In retrospect, it occurred to Hanson to be ashamed that the killing down there had been nothing but a welcome diversion to him, a break in the numbing routine; they were men who had died down there, after all, spilling their blood and giving their lives to inadvertently provide his vicarious entertainment. Prison was changing him, wearing him thin, making him less human.
At night now, when the prison itself was quiet, he could hear strange booming noises off in the distance, ponderous and slow and very far away, like the footsteps of some unimaginably huge beast, and occasionally there were strange wailings and unearthly shriekings that put the hairs up on the back of his neck. Lights flared on the horizon, dimmed, flared again, pulsed rhythmically.
One moonless night, peering from his window, Hanson had seen a huge indistinct shape like an immense metal spider go by, momentarily occulting the stars as it passed, padding soundlessly up the road.
There were strange things abroad in the world now.
The world was changing, becoming an unfamiliar place, leaving him behind. He’d felt trapped, buried, in the State Factory in Orange, his life crushed beneath its smothering weight, compelled to recognize that his whole existence had been for nothing, that it had no point or reason at all. Once he had had dreams and a wife. Both were long dead. Even after he’d been forced to flee Orange and miraculously found his way through the Wall surrounding the City of God, possibly the first man ever to do so, how much credit could he take for that? The only extraordinary thing he’d ever done in his life—and that mostly against his will, from necessity, being driven by forces beyond his control and by the will of other, better men—had been to enter the City of God, and decline an opportunity to assume godlike power . . . and, almost as an afterthought as he left, to shut off one section of the Wall. Was all this strangeness his fault, for having let men into the City of God, where they were not supposed to go?
If so, then the one moment of significance in his futile, meaningless life, for better or worse, was behind him now. From here on, it would make no difference that he’d ever been born.
It was clear that he’d never get out of here. It was clear that he’d die here, and be absorbed tracelessly into the dark river of anonymous and forgotten dead who stretched back to the very beginnings of humanity, most of them having lived and died without leaving so much as a mark on the slick, impervious surface of the world, nor any indication that they’d ever been there at all.
* * *
One morning in late winter or early spring, there were horses waiting impatiently in the forecourt, eight or ten of them, blowing steam from their noses and scraping with their hooves at the glittering hoarfrost that coated the cobblestones. Hanson could just see them from here, if he pressed his face out as far as it would go between the cold metal of the bars. Of the riders, there was no sign; they must have entered the prison. For no particular reason, he felt a thrill of unease—someone important must be visiting.
An hour or so later, he heard footsteps approach his cell door and stop in front of it, then the rattling of the lock as someone fumbled with it. He sat up on his cot, feeling an odd surge of mingled anxiety and anticipation.
The door swung open. The whistling guard stood there, accompanied by two of his fellows, all wearing truncheons at their belts. “On your feet, freak,” the guard said.
They hustled him down the familiar corridor to Overton’s office, but Overton wasn’t there. Instead, a tall, almost painfully thin man sat behind Overton’s desk, and unfolded himself to get to his feet as Hanson entered. He was expensively, almost foppishly, dressed, with lace at his sleeves and ruffles on his silk blouse, and wore thigh-high riding boots of gleaming black leather.
“Ah, Hanson,” he said, his face breaking into what seemed to be a broad, genuinely good-spirited grin. “I’m very glad to meet you at last.” It sounded like he really was. “I’m Salvatore Delgardo,” he said. Then, without changing expression or taking his eyes off Hanson, he said to the guards standing close behind, “Hold him.”
Two guards seized Hanson from either side, holding him fast.
Then, before Hanson had a chance to struggle or even react, Delgardo came forward around the desk, picked up a broad-bladed knife, and, with one swift motion, cut Hanson’s throat.
Hanson tried to scream, but could only make a strangling noise. The world did a slow somersault. He didn’t realize that he had fallen to the floor until he saw Delgardo standing over him. Delgardo had taken a cup from the desk, and now leaned close over Hanson and filled it with the blood that pumped from Hanson’s throat, being fastidiously careful not to splash any blood on his shirt. As Hanson watched in horror and amazement, his eyes already dimming, Delgardo raised the cup of blood to him in salute, and then drank it down in a single gulp.
The last thing Hanson heard was Delgardo’s cheerful voice saying, “Hanson, we’re going to be the greatest of friends!”
* * *
Hanson awoke that night in his cell, and instinctively clutched at his throat, but the wound was gone. He lay motionless in the darkness for a long time, listening to voices rise and fall somewhere off in the depths of the prison, too far away to make out the words. A door slammed somewhere with iron finality. The full moon looked in between the bars of the window like a fat bone-white face.
* * *
In the morning, they came for him again. He was taken to a part of the prison he’d never seen before, what must be the guards’ quarters, given water and coarse potash soap to wash with and new clothes, plain but sturdy, and had his hair cut short by a scowling, sour-smelling old woman—the first woman Hanson had seen, he realized, in however many years he had wasted away in his cell. Then they took h
im back out through the corridors to Overton’s office—or he supposed it was Delgardo’s office now. Overton seemed to be gone.
Delgardo was behind the desk, reading through a thick file of papers. He looked up, said, “Ah, Hanson! Come in, come in!” in a jovial tone, swept the papers into a sheaf and tamped them straight, then opened a drawer and made the papers disappear into it. He waited until Hanson, in response to his gesture, had sat down and the guards had left the room, then raised his hand portentously, with great significance, and stretched it out, palm first, toward Hanson. “I must thank you, my dear friend,” he said, “for making me immortal.” Hanson stared at him. “The first thing I did after they dragged you from the room,” Delgardo continued, “was slice my own hand, right here across the palm. Sliced it wide open. And look!” He brandished the hand theatrically in Hanson’s face. “The wound closed up! The wound is gone! I can’t be hurt!”
“You can be hurt,” Hanson said dully. “Believe me, you can.”
Delgardo chuckled. “Perhaps,” he said, “but it’s going to be damn difficult to kill me. Just like you.” He took the sheaf of papers out of the drawer again and flattened them on the desk, smoothing them lovingly with his long musician’s fingers. “That fool Overton had it all written down, but couldn’t ever see it. I’m surprised that oaf could even read! Whereas I have pored over every word again and again, for months, and it’s all here, in Boone’s explanations to you.” He pointed a finger at Hanson dramatically. “Cicero pumped your blood full of little machines that keep you healthy and repair any damage to you.” He was referring to events and people—well, Boone had been a person, anyway—from so long ago that Hanson had almost stopped believing in them. “By drinking your blood, I now have the same little machines within me! So I too am immortal!” He smiled broadly. “Once I read about your hand growing back, I knew what I had to do! Cut your throat!” He laughed good-naturedly.